Introduction of web auctions Setting up an auction with Web Auction is quick and simple.

You can either host the auc tion on your own web server or set up your own auction on our servers for free. You have full control over your auction. You can create your own categories, s et the start and end dates for your auction, select a custom header and footer, and enter the product categories that you want to have in your auction. Once the auction is installed and set up, you can begin adding products immediately. Each product can have a minimum bid, open and close date, a photo, and a preferred bid increment associated with it. Users of your auction can browse the products that are up for auction and submit bids. The winner will r eceive an email when the auction is closed with instructions on how to proceed.

Meaning of auction Web Auction is a simple auction designed for organizations or individuals who want to hold an auction. It is not like Ebay in the sense that only admins can add products. Products can have pictures, price, minimum bids, bid imcrements, and more. Origins of Auctions Auctions became common activities in 17th-Century England. The 18th Century saw the birth of two British auction houses Sothebys in 1774 and Christies in 1766. Colonial auctions were used to sell farm equipment, animals, tobacco, etc. In an auction, a seller offers an item up for sale, but does not establish a price. Potential buyers are given information about the item or some opportunity to examine the item; they can then offer bids.

Features Simple Administration Interface Web Auction includes a simple web-based administration console to control every asp ect of your auction from look & feel to user accounts. Start/End times You can choose a default start and end time for your auction. These times wi ll be applied to all products added to the auction, however, you can override th ese times on a per-product basis also. Bid Increments

Specify bid increments (h ow much each successive bid should increase) on an auctionwide or per-product b asis. Brows e by Category You can create categories for your auction. You can a ssign zero or more categories to each product, and Users are able to browse the products in your auction by category. Product Images & Descriptions You can upload an image and enter a description for each product. Watch List Users can easily keep track of products on which they have pl aced bids by monitoring their watch list. Email Notifications Users are no tified by email whenever they are outbid on a product. Users are also notified when they win an auction. Administrators can enable notification also to receiv e email when bids are placed and when auctions are closed. Administrative Reporting Administrators can easily see the current status of the a uction by viewing Web Auction's administrative reports.

WEB AUCTIONS STRATEGIES Online auctions provide a business opportunity They charge both buyers and sellers to participate and it can sell advertising on its pages People interested in specific items can form a market segment that advertisers will payextra to reachAuction Here sellers offer an item or items for sale but do not put a price and hence known asputting an item up for bid or putting an item on the block Potential buyers are given about the item examines it and offers bid The whole auction process is managed by an auctioneer Types: 1. English Auction: Starting from a low price, bidding increases until no bidder is willing to bid higher Known as ascending-price auction / open auction / open-outcry auction Minimum bid is price at which auction begin and if no bidders are willing to pay that price, the item is withdrawn

Minimum bid is not announced instead sellers can establish a minimumacceptable price called Reserve Price It offers multiple units of an item for sale and allow bidders to specifythe quantity they want to buy called Yankee AuctionsDrawbacks:1.winning bidder is required to bid a small amount more than next-higher bidder, winning bidder need not bid their full privatevaluations. Thus sellers will not obtain the maximum possible price.2.Bidders Risk In competition bidding sometimes bidding may tend to a value more than private valuations called winners curse 2. Dutch auction : Starts from a high price, bidding automatically decreasesuntil the bidder accepts the price Implemented using a clock that drops the price with each tick and the first bidder to call stop, stops the clock and becomes winning bidder Advantage for seller : The price will not fall below the valuation as there will be a fear of losing item to another bidder Adv- moves large number of items quickly Eg: online auction that uses Dutch auction is ColdWater Creek Disadv:- many online retailers found that dutch auction didnot increase sales or generate interest and caused confusion among their customers 2 0 0 4 - G o o g l e u s e d d u t c h a u c t i o n t o s e l l i t s s t o c k t o investors in its initial public offering 3.First- Price Sealed Bid Auctions Secret bidding process Higher bidder pays the amount of the highest bid 4.Second Price Sealed Bid Auction Secret bidding process Highest bidder pays amount of the second highest bid William Vickrey won Nobel price in Economics for his studies of this auction type. Encourages bidders to bid the amounts of their private valuations and protected fromhigher bid 5.Double Auction(open outcry)

 Buyers and sellers declare combined price quantity bids.The auctioneer matches seller offers(lowest to highest) with buyer offers(highest to lowest) Buyers and sellers can modify bids based on knowledge gained from other bids This auction works well only for items of known quality such as securities or gradedagricultural products 6.Double auction(Sealed bid) Buyers and sellers declare combined price quantity bids. The auctioneer matchs seller offers (lowest to highest) with buyer offers( highest tolowest) Buyers and sellers cannot modify their bids Eg: New York Stock Exchange 7. Reverse- auction(Seller bid) Multiple sellers submit price bids to an auctioneer that represents a single buyer Bids are given at a given amount of a specific item that a buyer wants to purchase Prices go down as the bidding continues until no seller is willing to bid lower

Categories of web auctions

Three broad categories of auction Web sites are emerging: general consumer auctions, speciality consumer auctions and business-to-business auctions.

General Consumer Auctions One of the most known general consumer auction sites is eBay. Sellers on the site pay various fees, while the buyers only pay the price at the end of the auction as well as shipping. You can purchase almost anything on there, even food. There are many features offered on there, including proxy bidding, which is used when the customer may not be able to be on the whole time the auction is going on and are computer-controlled. As long as the highest bid is below the

proxy bid, the computer will continue to place bids until the proxy bid has been met. Also, they offer a feature called "Buy it Now," where a bidder can buy the item up for bid at the reserve price listed on the page for the item up for auction. Due to the success of eBay, many sites have had a hard time entering the market (this is known as the lock-in effect), but have instead decided to target specific markets. Specialty Consumer Auctions After the success of ebay, many companies found that it was nearly impossible to compete in the same market. However, many have found success in specialty markets that focus on a particular type of product. One site that does such is Haggle.com, which host auctions on mostly electronics and home supplies. Users purchase bids which are used in auctions that are hosted on their site. This company, along with a few others, have one of the smartest business ideas out there, but where they are getting by with it at is that so many people don't see how much Haggle is actually making on each auction. B2B Auctions B2B auctions have evolved mainly for the purpose of getting rid of excess materials. There are two methods of distributing these materials are through liquadation brokers and online auctions. There are three B2B auction models, two of which are based on the traditional methods used to distribute excess items. The first model is used by larger businesses, which the company creates their own site to sell the inventroy. In the small-business model, the company works with a thirdparty Web auction site to sell the inventory similar companies that need it. The third model is similar to a consumer auction in which a business creates a site that is used to auction off the materials. Another use of B2B auction sites is to list employment opportunities, which are usually temporary positions.

Meaning of web portal A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.

Examples of public web portals are AOL, Excite, iGoogle, MSN, Netvibes, and Yahoo!.

Classification Horizontal vs. vertical portal (Vortals) Two broad categorizations of portals are horizontal portals, which cover many areas, and vertical portals, which are focused on one functional area. Another definition for a horizontal portal is, that it is used as a platform to several companies in the same economic sector or to the same type of manufacturers or distributors.[1] A vertical portal consequently is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest, also called vortal.[2] Vertical information portal A vertical information portal (VIP) is a specialized entry point to a specific marketplace and or industry niche. VIP's provide news, editorial content, digital publications, and e-commerce capabilities. Separate from traditional vertical portals, VIP's provide dynamic multimedia applications including social networking, video posting, and blogging.

Types of web portals Personal portals A personal portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed for sharing and collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones/mobile phones. Information, news, and updates are examples of content that would be delivered through such a portal. Personal portals can be related to any specific topic such as providing friend information on a social network or providing links to outside content that may help others beyond your reach of services. Portals are not limited to simply providing links. Information or content that is placed on the web may create a portal in the sense of a path to new knowledge and capabilities. News portals The traditional media rooms all around the world are fast adapting to the new age technologies. This marks the beginning of news portals by media houses across the globe. This new media channels give them the opportunity to reach the viewers in a shorter span of time than their print media counter parts.

Government web portals At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. These included primary portals to the Governments as well as portals developed for specific audiences. Examples of Government web portals include;

australia.gov.au for Australia. newzealand.govt.nz for New Zealand. USA.gov for the United States (in English) & GobiernoUSA.gov (in Spanish). Disability.gov for citizens with disabilities in the United States. Directgov for citizens & businesslink.gov.uk for businesses in the United Kingdom. india.gov.in for India. Europa (web portal) links to all EU agencies and institutions in addition to press releases and audiovisual content from press conferences. Health-EU portal gathers all relevant health topics from across Europe. National Resource Directory links to resources for United States Service Members, Veterans and their families (NRD.gov).

Cultural Portals Cultural portals aggregate digitised cultural collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This type of portals provides a point of access to invisible web cultural content that may not be indexed by standard search engines. Digitised collections can include books, artworks, photography, journals, newspapers, music, sound recordings, film, maps, diaries and letters, and archived websites as well as the descriptive metadata associated with each type of cultural work. These portals are usually based around a specific national or regional groupings of institutions. Examples of cultural portals include:

DigitalNZ A cultural portal led by the National Library of New Zealand focused on New Zealand digital content. Europeana A cultural portal for the European Union based in the National Library of the Netherlands and overseen by the Europeana Foundation. Trove A cultural portal led by the National Library of Australia focused on Australian content. In development - Digital Public Library of America

Corporate web portals Corporate intranets became common during the 1990s. As intranets grew in size and complexity, webmasters were faced with increasing content and user management challenges. A consolidated view of company information was judged insufficient; users wanted personalization and customization. Webmasters, if skilled enough, were able to offer some capabilities, but for the most part ended up driving users away from using the intranet.

Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and through personalized views. Portal solutions can also include workflow management, collaboration between work groups, and policy-managed content publication. Most can allow internal and external access to specific corporate information using secure authentication or single sign-on. JSR168 Standards emerged around 2001. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 standards allow the interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. These standards allow portal developers, administrators and consumers to integrate standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions. The concept of content aggregation seems to still gain momentum and portal solution will likely continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the Business Mashups concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism.[citation needed] With the increase in user generated content, disparate data silos, and file formats, information architects and taxonomist will be required to allow users the ability to tag (classify) the data. This will ultimately cause a ripple effect where users will also be generating ad hoc navigation and information flows. Corporate Portals also offer customers & employees self-service opportunities. Stock portals Also known as stock-share portals, stock market portals or stock exchange portals are Web-based applications that facilitates the process of informing the share-holders with substantial online data such as the latest price, ask/bids, the latest News, reports and announcements. Some stock portals use online gateways through a central depository system (CDS) for the visitors to buy or sell their shares or manage their portfolio. Search portals Search portals aggregate results from several search engines into one page. Tender's portals Tender's portals stands for a gateway to search/modify/submit/archive data on tenders and professional processing of continuous online tenders. With a tender portal the complete tendering processsubmitting of proposals, assessment, administrationare done on the web. Electronic or online tendering is just carrying out the same traditional tendering process in an electronic form, using the Internet.

Using online tendering, bidders can do any of the following:

Receive notification of the tenders. Receive tender documents online. Fill out the forms online. Submit proposals and documents. Submit bids online.

Hosted web portals Hosted web portals gained popularity a number of companies began offering them as a hosted service. The hosted portal market fundamentally changed the composition of portals. In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data from distributed databases. The early hosted portal companies such as Hyperoffice.com or the now defunct InternetPortal.com focused on collaboration and scheduling in addition to the distribution of corporate data. As hosted web portals have risen in popularity their feature set has grown to include hosted databases, document management, email, discussion forums and more. Hosted portals automatically personalize the content generated from their modules to provide a personalized experience to their users. In this regard they have remained true to the original goals of the earlier corporate web portals. Emerging new classes of internet portals called Cloud Portals are showcasing the power of API (Application Programming Interface) rich software systems leveraging SOA (service oriented architecture, web services, and custom data exchange) to accommodate machine to machine interaction creating a more fluid user experience for connecting users spanning multiple domains during a given "session". Leading cloud portals like Nubifer Cloud Portal: [1] showcase what is possible using Enterprise Mashup and Web Service integration approaches to building cloud portals. Domain-specific portals A number of portals have come about that are specific to the particular domain, offering access to related companies and services, a prime example of this trend would be the growth in property portals that give access to services such as estate agents, removal firm, and solicitors that offer conveyancing. Along the same lines, industry-specific news and information portals have appeared, such as the clinical trials specific portal: IFPMA Clinical Trials Portal

Standards

Web Services for Remote Portlets v1 JSR 168 (Java Portlet Definition Standard) JSR 286 (Java Portlet v2.0 Definition Standard)

How To Set A Sensible Web Portal Strategy

There's quite a frenzy today surrounding Internet portals. With all the hoopla, it's easy to forget a few important points:

All Web sites are not portals. A portal is a Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources such as e-mail, forums, search engines and online shopping malls. Although there is no single model for what constitutes a portal, all portals offer at least five core features: Web searching, news, reference tools, access to online shopping venues and some communications capabilities. Few enterprises possess the ability or desire to build portal sites themselves; most enterprises should concentrate on leveraging the marketing benefits of third-party portals. Not every enterprise needs to be a portal. Although it is trendy to speak of all things Web as part of a portal today, reality requires a more pragmatic approach. Gartner Group has take the wraps off the win/place/show model to describe the options for an enterprise's Internet portal strategy. The "win" strategy is the most aggressive of the three portal strategies. The competition in this space is fierce, with contenders such as AOL, Yahoo, Netscape, Infoseek and Lycos leading the pack with established brand identity, interactive services, aggregated content and ISP functionality. The enterprise's strategic goal must be to become a "network." The "place" strategy is to be an element of the content mix within existing portals. The goal is to ride the coattails of the leaders, much the way a studio places a promising broadcast series on a leading network. Enterprises that have compelling content should strike deals with those in the first category. The "show" strategy is to show up as output in portals' search engines. Most enterprises will find themselves in this category, as companies that do not seek to become a network. These enterprises have a firmly established Internet presence and seek to leverage that investment across a broader audience.

Not all Internet content will be driven by portals. While the buzzword "portal" will likely die in 1999, to be replaced by yet another buzzword describing similar concepts, the ideas behind portals-as access point, branding-will still be important. But enterprises should not overlook the most important tool for a Web presence: the lowly, much maligned URL. Web addresses and the underlying Domain Name System are not broken despite conventional wisdom and political posturing. After all, even the portals themselves have based their strategies on their URLs.